by Spain, Laura
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You boys like going down to that cove, huh?”
Harlow nodded. The idea crossed his mind that his brother, promised some sort of cool toy or video game in Eugene, had given away the plentaple and its location. He then pictured himself whizzing on everything in Will’s bedroom, including his comic books and mattress.
“Man oh man, I remember when I was your age. I loved going to the cove. Of course, I didn’t have a brother to play with, just your two aunts. They were older than me and just wanted to sunbathe all the time.”
Harlow nodded, still on the alert. Whatever was going on, it was definitely weird. He could feel it in the air.
“You just never know how good you got it until something changes, huh? Like when summer ends.”`
The waitress arrived with their food. Harlow could see down her shirt when she leaned over to set the plates on the table, revealing two tan swells of flesh with a small gold chain dangling between. After she left, they dug into their food and Harlow was grateful for the interruption. He was even more grateful a couples minutes later when his father stood and said he had to go to the bathroom, leaving Harlow alone at the table to eat in peace.
The diner buzzed as people came and went. Harlow focused on chowing down, wanting to finish his meal so they could leave the stuffy diner as soon as possible. He was down to one piece of syrupy bacon when the man in the blue pea coat appeared in front of their booth, smiling with both hands jammed into his coat. His hair and beard were even brighter and more coppery red up close, set aglow by the sunlight streaming in through the diner’s windows.
“Good morning,” the stranger said, smiling. “Having a good breakfast?”
Harlow chewed on the end of his bacon, watching the man. He swallowed and looked toward the bathroom.
“No. Not really.”
The stranger nodded, still smiling. He had crinkles around his eyes, but he didn’t look too old.
“I don’t mean to take up much of your time, son, but you struck me as the ocean loving type. With that tan and such. Do you go to the beach a lot?”
Harlow poked the rest of the bacon into his mouth and chewed it slowly. He’d already talked to this stranger more than he was supposed to, but who cared? They were in a public place and he could always scream.
“Yeah. I like the beach.”
The stranger tilted his head.
“Is that so?”
“Yep.”
“And have you found anything interesting at the beach recently? Anything especially, well, strange?”
Harlow swallowed the rest of his bacon, which suddenly felt like a big greasy lump, and drank his water. He tried to keep his eyes blank, as stupid as stupid, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Found the bottom half of a fishing pole yesterday.”
“That’s all?”
Harlow burped up water and bacon grease. “Pretty much. Looked like something bit it in half. Maybe a shark, even.”
The stranger stroked his beard and stared at him, his blue eyes bright and searching. Harlow dropped his gaze and drew a circle on the table with his finger, creating invisible ring upon invisible ring. The rest of the diner—the other customers, the waitresses, the sound of meat frying—seemed to draw back from the corner booth, as if the boy and the stranger had suddenly been encased in a bubble to which no one else in the world was allowed access.
The stranger took his right hand out of his pocket and held it out.
“Well, son, thank you for your time.”
“No problem.”
Ennobled by the success of his lie, Harlow reached out and shook the stranger’s hand with the firm, manly grip he’d seen his father use so many times. He felt a slight, almost electric shiver trace up his arm and heard his jaw pop.“Okay, then,” the stranger said, smiling again as he released Harlow’s hand. He turned sharply on his heel, strode through the diner, and marched out the front door, his flapping coat trailing behind him like a banner.
Harlow sat back in the booth and stared at the empty spot where the stranger had been standing. He massaged his jaw, trying to find the source of the popping sound as his father returned to the booth and sat down. His father refilled his coffee from the plastic carafe the waitress had left with them and studied Harlow, his brow creasing.
“Harley, I have something to tell you.”
Harlow held up his arm and examined it—he could still feel a faint, electric trace from the handshake.
“Pay attention, Harlow. This is serious.”
Harlow lowered his arm and looked at his father.
“Son, your mother and I have decided to get a divorce.”
* * * * *
After breakfast, they went to the bank and the hardware store. Harlow stayed in the truck while his father ran his errands. Both windows in the truck were open, but he felt like he could not get enough air.
Also, the day seemed bright.
Way, way too bright.
* * * * *
His father drove fast on the way home, as if he wanted to get the trip over with as soon as possible. Wind buffeted Harlow as it zipped through one of the cab’s open windows and out the other. He opened his mouth and inhaled the pine-scented air, narrowing his eyelids until only a slit of light shone through, his gaze fixed on the highway ahead.
“I’m sorry, Harlow. I know this must be a big shock.”
Two crows abandoned a flattened raccoon twenty feet ahead, black wings flapping as they reluctantly rose above the asphalt. He could see stringy bits of red hanging from their claws.
“We debated telling you and Will at the same time, all of us together, but decided it would be better to let each of you deal with it in your own way. No pressure to be cool and all that. You know what I mean?”
They took a curve sharply and Harlow felt his breakfast shift in his stomach. He imagined Will and his mother in Eugene, sitting at a nice restaurant of their own. Will probably had gotten her to take him to the good steakhouse—he always got his way, especially with Mom. He’d be eating a big fat steak with cheesy mashed potatoes and pepper beans.
“Don’t worry, though. Tonight we’ll all get together in the living room and talk it out as a family. We’ll have a good pow-wow, go over all the arrangements top-to-bottom, and afterwards I’ll make my kettle corn. It won’t be so bad.”
Harlow closed his eyes all the way and listened to the wind roaring through the truck. If he did that, his father’s voice became just part of the noise, his words nothing but little scraps of roar.
When they got back home, Harlow headed straight inside. He wanted his bedroom. He wanted his bed. He wanted to sleep for a thousand years and wake up only when nothing was recognizable and everyone was dust. Instead, he found Killer sitting in the hallway outside his bedroom, her ears pinned back as she stared through the open doorway. Scowling, Harlow ignored the cat’s weirdness and went inside the room, flipping on the light switch as he kicked off his sandals.
A shadowy, round shape sat in the middle of his bed, perched upon his pillow. It waved a tentacle at him, as if saying howdy.
4
Down the hallway, the door to his father’s office slammed shut. Harlow stopped at the foot of the bed, took a quick, shallow breath, and held it for a long minute before quietly exhaling. “Oh boy,” Harlow whispered, circling round the bed. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.” The sea creature appeared to be fixed firmly onto his bed, with its tentacles spilling out in all directions beneath it. The creature seemed way bigger than he remembered. Majorly bulked up.
“You came up from the cave, didn’t you?”
The thin line of the creature’s mouth folded into itself and flattened again, a twitch so quick Harlow thought he might have imagined it. He couldn’t see the gashes in its skin anymore. No pink blood.
Harlow tripped over something and landed on the floor.
“Ooof.”
The boy looked down at his feet—he’d tripped over one the
tentacles spilling off the bed. This one was thicker than the others, like a hose filled with water. It ran all the way off the bed, across the carpeted floor, and into the wall on the other side of the room. It looked like…
“Whoa.”
Harlow sat up and climbed on all fours across the carpet, squinting. The tentacle he’d tripped over was plugged into an electrical socket beneath his window. Both sockets, actually—the tentacle had split apart into six smaller, rope-like ends that plugged into the wall sockets like they’d been made for it. Harlow leaned over the tentacle and listened, almost touching it with his ear.
He could hear humming.
Electric humming.
Harlow exhaled and straightened, still on his knees. This brought him eye-level with the creature, which had turned on the bed to watch him.
“What are you? Really?”
Killer had come in through the doorway to watch the sea creature, her back arched and fur frizzed up. She hissed as the sea creature raised a tentacle in the air and dropped it back onto the bed, where it lay faintly trembling.
“It’s okay, Killer. Settle down.”
The creature raised two more tentacles and waved them at the cat. Killer coiled back, her head retracting into the round lump of her body as her wide eyes followed the creature. Harlow got to his feet and rubbed his knees.
“You’re not from Japan, are you? Will was wrong. I bet you’re not even—”
Killer darted forward and leapt onto the bed. She took a swipe at one of the tentacles, claws extended.
“Killer, no!”
The tabby cat rose above the bed, as if levitating. One of the sea creature’s tentacles had coiled around the cat’s stomach and lifted her off the bed. It waved the snarling, writhing cat in the air casually, as if was holding nothing but a pillow or a large, hairy burrito. Harlow jumped on the bed and reached for the cat.
“Let her go!”
Another tentacle flew across the bed and struck Harlow in the chest, knocking him off his feet and onto the bedroom floor. Killer let out a single pained yowl as the creature squeezed the cat tighter and drew it closer to its cloudy red eyes. Harlow got back to his feet, dazed and tasting blood in back of his mouth.
Killer got a leg free, somehow, and took a swipe at the sea creature’s dome. The plentaple responded by lifting the cat further above its head and thumping it into the wall once, twice, three times.
Killer yowled again, softer this time.
Harlow looked around for some kind of weapon and saw the tentacle still plugged into the wall. He grabbed it with both hands, dug his heels into the carpet, and pulled.
The world filled with white light—
Glorious.
Like Heaven.
* * * * *
He woke to Will standing above him, looking royally freaked out.
“Holy cow, Harlow. Holy cow.”
Harlow moved his tongue around his mouth. He tasted copper and felt electricity humming through his veins, inside his toes. The light in the room seemed weak compared to the light he’d seen. He wanted to go back to sleep.
“What did you do? Bring it up from the cove yourself?”
Harlow sat up from the floor and wondered if he was going to puke. The round sea creature was still sitting on the bed, watching them both with its huge red eyes. It looked smaller again, less freaky.
Harlow looked around the room, remembering.
“Where’s Killer?”
“I don’t know. We just got home. I don’t know what the heck’s going on, dude. Mom and Dad—”
“Yeah, I know.” Harlow pushed himself off the floor, using the edge of the bed, and wavered unsteadily on his feet. “We need to take it back. We need to send it home.”
Will threw his arms into the air. “They’re getting a divorce, Harlow. A flippin’ divorce!”
“It doesn’t belong here. It’s dangerous.”
Will dropped his arms and took a few breaths. Harlow peered closely at the plentaple, looking for tufts of orange fur around its mouth.
“Fine,” Will said, “let’s take it back. Did you bring it in the tub?”
“No, it came up by itself.”
“What? It freaking walks on land?”
“I guess.”
Frowning, Harlow went to his closet and pulled open the accordion doors. He rifled through mess of clothes, toys, and sporting equipment, finally pulling out the rain stick he’d bought on their trip to Mt. Rainer. It was four feet long, almost as tall as him, and when he turned it upside down it made a rushing watery sound.
Harlow extended the rain stick to the plentaple. It eyed it for a moment, thinking, and wrapped a tentacle around its end. Harlow gave the rain stick a slight tug and the creature rose from the bed, moving so smoothly upon its other appendages it seemed to float off the bed and dropped to the floor without making a sound.
“Oh man,” Will said.
It was like pulling a cloud.
* * * * *
They crept out into the hallway, Harlow leading the plentaple along while Will trailed behind. They could hear their parents’ voices, loud and combative, coming from their father’s office down the hall. Harlow glanced back at his old brother, whose eyebrows were knitted together as he frowned, listening.
“What do you think, Will?”
“This one could take a while, maybe. We might have an hour until they come looking for us.”
They headed toward the front door so they didn’t have to go past the office. Killer poked her head into the hallway from the kitchen, saw the sea creature, and darted back out of sight. Harlow sighed in relief, glad their cat was okay, but then he noticed he didn’t have his sandals on—he’d left them in his bedroom.
“Will—”
“Shhh.”
“My shoes. I don’t have my shoes.”
“Screw it, dude. We don’t have time.”
Harlow paused, momentarily seized by an ominous foreboding. Maybe they should tell their parents about the plentaple, after all. They usually knew what to do about everything else—
Something shattered in his father’s office. It sounded like…glass?
“Go, Harlow. Go.”
Harlow opened the door and drew the sea creature outside. Will followed after, closing the door, and they all squinted in the bright sunlight. Harlow’s legs began to tremble beneath him and he couldn’t tell if it was from what had happened earlier or what was happening now. He wanted to hand the water stick over to his brother, sit down on the front steps, and just be finished with it—all of it.
“Come on, man,” Will said, starting around the north side the house, away from the windows of their father’s office. “We don’t have all day.”
Harlow lowered his head and trudged forward. The plentaple trailed along gamely behind, bringing up the rear as it moved along on its own rubbery legs, its cloudy red eyes occasionally blinking as it took in the grassy land, the high blue sky. They crossed the yard, paused at the edge of the cliff to consider the frothing ocean, and started down the zigzagging stairway to the cove floor. As they steadily climbed down, Harlow told Will about eating at the diner with their father and the weird old guy in the wool pea coat. He told him about the drive about in the windy truck and finding the plentaple sitting in his bed, plugged into the electrical socket like a toaster or a lamp. The fight with Killer and the white light that followed.
He asked will about his lunch with Mom, but he didn’t want to talk about it.
* * * * *
By the time they’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Harlow thought about dropping the rain stick and running into the ocean full-blast. He’d swim past the breakers, go past the edge of the cove, and plunge headlong into the tallest, curling waves, which would take him, sooner or later, all the way to Japan.
Will took a few steps across the stony beach and stopped, shielding his eyes from the afternoon glare with his hand.
“So we just, like, set him free?”
Harlow looke
d down at the plentaple. Instead of watching the ocean, it had swung around to look back at the cliff. Harlow turned around and followed its gaze to the bottom of the stairway. The red-bearded man from the diner looked back at him, arms crossed in front of his chest as the sea breeze whipped the tails of his pea coat.
“Hello, boys,” he said, shouting into the wind. “I would like to speak with you.”
Harlow shivered and tasted the copper at the back of his mouth, recalling the white light that had filled his mind when he’d touched the electrified plentaple.
That was death, he realized.
He’d been close to Death and here it was again, wearing a dark navy blue pea coat in the middle of summer.
“No thanks,” Harlow shouted back. “I don’t think any of us want to talk to you, now or ever.”
The stranger raised his hands.
“Please—”
Harlow lowered his head and sprinted toward the sea—the stranger had the stairway blocked off and there was nowhere else to go. They would all just have to swim out of the cove and hope they made it down to the next beach.
Will came running up beside him and shouted something, pointing out at the ocean. Another man had appeared, walking in from the sea toward the shore.
He was bigger than the first stranger.
Much bigger.
5
Harlow and Will stopped running, halting at the edge of the incoming tide. Despite the waves rushing at his waist, the second stranger walked smoothly, with an even stride. His bald head gleamed in the sun; his face was square and handsome. His skin was deeply tanned, almost golden, and the only piece of clothing he had on was a pair of black pants that were belted at the waist with a blue rubber cable.
The closer the stranger got, the bigger he seemed—like a giant in a fairy tale. He had green eyes that sparkled.
“Damn,” Will said, taking a step back. “He’s freaking huge.”
Harlow peeled his eyes from the tall stranger and looked around. The plentaple had let go of the rain stick and was sitting in a tidal pool a few feet away. It bobbed up and down contentedly, watching the approaching giant. The bearded man in the pea coat looked a lot more excited—he was shouting as he ran toward them.
